Riverworld03- The Dark Design (1977)

by Philip José Farmer

  "In 1918."

  Martin Farrington looked at Rider, then said, " I suppose you saw a lot of movies when you were a kid?"

  "Didn't everybody?"

  "And what about your education?"

  "I got a B. A. in English literature with a minor in philosophy and I was a compulsive reader. Lord, how I miss reading!"

  "Me, too," Farrington said.

  There was a pause. Rider said, "Well, our memories of Earth get dimmer every day."

  Which meant that if Frigate had seen Rider in the films and Farrington on the dust jackets of books, he did not remember them. The captain's question about his education might, however, have a double interest. He would want a crewman who could talk intelligently about many matters. On Earth, Farrington's forecastle companions had been brutal and illiterate, not exactly his soulmates. So, for that matter, had been most of the people he knew until he had gone to college.

  "We seem to have about ten in all to interview,'' Farrington said. "We'll make our choice after we've talked to everybody. We'll let you know before noon."

  Peter wanted desperately to be chosen, but he was afraid that too much eagerness might put them off. Since they we're, for some reason, traveling under pseudonyms, they might be wary of someone who was trying too hard to sign on. Why, he did not know.

  "One thing we forgot," Rider said. "We don't have room for more than one hand. You can't take your woman along. Is that okay?"

  "No problem."

  "You can take turns with Abigail," Rider said. "If you don't mind sharing with three others. And if she likes you, of course. But she hasn't shown many antipathies so far."

  "She's a luscious woman," Peter said. "But that sort of thing doesn't appeal to me."

  "Mustafa kind of likes you," Farrington said, grinning. "He's been eyeing you."

  Frigate looked at the Turk, who winked, and he blushed.

  "That appeals even less."

  "Just make that plain, and you won't be bothered by him or Binns," Farrington said. "I'm no homo, but I saw a lot of buggery. Any man who sails under the mast has; every ship, naval or commercial, has been a viper's nest of sodomy since Noah. Those two are real he-men, aside from their lack of interest in the fair sex. And they're damn good sailors. So just tell them to back off. If, that is, we accept you. But I don't want any bitching about being hard up. You can catch up when we go ashore, and if we lose a man you can get a woman for your bunkmate. She has to be a good sailor, though. Everyone pulls his weight on this ship."

  "Abigail's looking more appealing by the second," Frigate said.

  Farrington and Rider laughed, and Frigate moved on.

  For a while, he stood by the dock area. This was a shallow bay which had been hacked with much labor out of the bank. Stone cut from the base of the mountains had been carried down here and used to line the shore. Wooden docks had been extended from the bank, but these held mainly small catboats, lugboats, and catamarans. Two giant rafts with masts were tied up here, too. These were used for dragonfishing. A number of warcanoes, capable of holding forty men each, were beached near the rafts. Canoes and rowboats were putting out now for fishing. By noon, The River would be heavily salted with small and large boats.

  The Razzle Dazzle was too large to fit within the piers. It was anchored near the mouth of the bay behind a breakwater of large black rocks. It was a beautiful ship, long and low, built of oak and pine. There wasn't a nail in it, and the pegs had been cut with flint. The sails were made of treated outer skin of the dragonfish, so thin they were translucent. The oaken figurehead was a full-busted mermaid holding a torch.

  The ship was a wonder, and the wonder was how its crew had managed to avoid having it taken from them. Many had been murdered for much lesser craft.

  Feeling anxious, he walked past Farrington and Rider. The interviews were by no means over. Word had gotten around, and now there were about twenty men and ten women waiting in line. If this continued, the questioning might take all day. There was nothing he could do about it, so he shrugged and went back home. Eve was gone, which was just as well. There was no need to tell her what he was doing until he found out if he was leaving. If he was turned down, he'd say nothing to her.

  Part of his duty as a Ruritanian citizen was to assist in alcohol-making. He might as well work off a half-day today. The labor would help keep him from worrying. He walked through the passes between the hills until these gave out. There were four more hills to climb, each increasingly higher. The trees were thicker here; the huts, fewer. Presently he was on top of the highest hill, which was at the base of the mountain. Its smooth stone ran straight up for an estimated 1228 meters or about 6000 feet. A waterfall thundered about 91 meters or 100 yards away, spilling thousands of liters a minute into a pool. From this, the water ran in a broad channel which would thread a course through the hills to The River.

  Frigate passed by the fires, the wooden, glass, and stone equipment, and the odor of alcohol. He climbed up a bamboo ladder until he was on a platform placed against an area of stone from which lichen had not yet been removed. He reported to a foreman, who gave him a chert scraper. The foreman took from a rack a pine stick with Frigate's initials cut into it. It bore alternating horizontal and vertical lines, the former indicating the days he'd worked, the latter the number of months.

  "Next year you'll be using a stick to scrape off the stuff," the foremen said. "We'll be saving the chert and flint for weapons."

  Peter nodded and went to work.

  In time, the supply of flint would be exhausted. Technology on The Riverworld would go backward. Instead of progressing from a wooden to a stone age, humanity would reverse the procedure.

  Frigate wondered how he was going to get his flint-tipped weapons out of the state. If he sailed on Farrington' s craft he would, according to the law, have to leave his precious stones behind.

  The time put in by Frigate on this work was estimated by the foreman. Except for the sun, there were few clocks of any type. The little glass available was used in the alcohol-making process, so there were not even hourglasses. For that matter, the sand used to make the glass had been imported from a state 800 kilometers down-River. That had cost Rumania several boatloads of tobacco and booze and piles of dragonfish and hornfish skins and bones. The tobacco and alcohol had been contributed by the citizens from their grails. Frigate had given up smoking and drinking for two months during this time of sacrifice. When it was over, he continued his abstinence from smoking, trading his cigarettes and cigars for whiskey. But, as had happened on Earth and here, he had slipped back into the arms of Demon Nicotine.

  He worked hard, scraping off the thick green-blue plant growth from the black rock and stuffing it into the bamboo buckets. Others lowered the buckets on ropes to the ground, where their contents were dumped into vats.

  Shortly before noon, he knocked off for the lunch hour. Before going down the ladders, he looked out over the hills. Far below, the white hull of the Razzle Dazzle shone in the bright sun. Somehow, he was going to be on it when it up-anchored.

  Peter walked back to the hut, noted that Eve wasn't there, and went on down to the plain. The line of interviewers did not look any shorter. He passed along the edge of the plain where its short grass abruptly stopped and the long grass of the hills began. What made for the line of demarcation? Were there chemicals in the hill soil that halted the encroachment of plain grass? Or was it vice versa? Or both? And why?

  The archery range was about half a kilometer south of the dock area. He practiced shooting at a target of grass on a bamboo tripod for about thirty minutes. Then he went to the gymnasium area and ran sprints and made long jumps and engaged in judo, karate, and spear-fighting for two hours. At the end of the time, he was sweating and tired. But he was bursting with joy. It was wonderful to have a twenty– five– year-old body, the tiredness and feebleness of middle and old age gone, the aches and pains, the fat, the hernia, the ulcer, the headaches, the long-sightedness, all no more. Replacing it,
the ability to run or swim swiftly and far, to feel sexual desire every night (and a good part of the day).

  The worst thing he had done on Earth was to get a desk job as a technical writer at the age of thirty-eight and then at fifty-one, to become a fulltime fiction writer. He should have stayed in the steel mill. It was monotonous work, but while his body was handling the hot, heavy work, his mind was busy dreaming up stories. At night he would read or write.

  It was when he had started to sit on his butt all day that he had begun drinking so heavily. And his reading had diminished, too. It was too easy after working on a typewriter eight hours a day to sit in front of the TV all evening and swill Bourbon or Scotch. TV, the worst thing that had happened to the twentieth century. After the atom bomb and overpopulation, of course.

  No, he told himself, that wasn't fair. He didn't have to be a boob before the tube. He could have used the self-discipline which enabled him to write to turn the set off except at highly selected times. But the lotus-eater syndrome had gotten him. Besides, there were programs on TV which were really excellent, both entertaining and educational.

  Still, this world was good in that there were no TV's or automobiles or atom bombs or gross national production or paychecks or mortgages or medical bills. Or air or water pollution and almost no dust. And nobody gave a damn about communism or socialism or capitalism, because they didn't exist. Well, that was not quite true. Most states did have a sort of primitive communism.

  Chapter 31

  * * *

  He walked to the river and plunged in, cleaning off the sweat. Then he trotted along the bank (no huts allowed within 30 meters of it) to the dock area. He hung around until dinnertime, talking to friends. In between, he watched the two from the Razzle Dazzle. They were still interviewing, though lubricating their throats with frequent drinks. Wasn't that line ever going to end?

  Just before it was suppertime, Farrington stood up and announced in a loud voice that he was taking no more applications. Those still in the line protested, but he said that he'd had enough.

  By then the head of Ruritania, "Baron" Thomas Bullitt, had appeared with his councillors. Bullitt had had some small claim to fame in his day. In 1775 he had explored the Ohio River falls by the area which would become Louisville, Kentucky. Commissioned by the William and MaryCollege of Virginia, he surveyed the area. And thereafter disappeared from history. His aide-de-camp, Paulus Buys, a sixteenth-century Dutchman, was with him. Both invited the crew of the Razzle Dazzle to a party in their honor that night. The main reason for the invitation was to hear the adventures of the crew. River-dwellers loved gossip and exciting tales, since their fields of entertainment were limited.

  Farrington accepted, but said that six of the crew would have to stay on the ship as guards. Frigate followed the crowd to a large roofed-over area, the Town Hall. Torches and bonfires drove back the darkness, and an orchestra played while the local variety of square-dancing began. Frisco and Tex stood around for a while, talking to the chief statesmen and their wives and close friends. Frigate, as one of the hoi polloi, was not admitted to the sacred circle. He knew, however, that the event would become much less formal later on. While he was standing in line to get the free liter of pure alcohol allowed per person at such functions, he was joined by his hutmate.

  Eve Bellington waved at him and then got into line twelve persons behind him. She was tall, full figured, black haired, blue. eyed, a Georgia peach. Born 1850, died two days before her one hundred first birthday. Her father was a wealthy cotton planter with a distinguished record as a major in the Confederate cavalry. The Bellington plantation was burned down during Sherman's march through Georgia, and the Bellingtons had become penniless. Her father had then gone to California and found enough gold to buy a partnership in a shipping firm.

  Eve had loved being wealthy again, but she still had not forgiven him for leaving her mother and herself to struggle through the occupation and the early years of Reconstruction.

  During her father's absence, Eve and her mother had lived with her father's brother, a handsome man only ten years older than Eve. He had raped her (without too much resistance, Eve admitted) when she was fifteen. When her mother had found that her daughter was pregnant, she had shot the uncle in the legs and the genitals. He survived a few years as a crippled eunuch in prison.

  Mrs. Bellington then moved to Richmond, Virginia, where her husband joined them. Eve's son by the uncle grew up to be tall and handsome, dearly beloved by his mother. After a furious quarrel with his uncle-grandfather, he left to seek his fortune in the West. A letter from Silver City, Colorado, was the last Eve ever heard from him. He'd disappeared somewhere in the Rockies, according to a report sent by a detective.

  Her mother had died in a fire, and her father had died of a heart attack while trying to rescue her mother. Eve's first husband died of cholera shortly thereafter, and before she was fifty she had lost two more husbands and six of her ten children.

  Her life was that of a heroine of a novel on which Margaret Mitchell and Tennessee Williams might have collaborated. She didn't think it was very funny when Peter had told her that.

  After thirty-plus years on The Riverworld, Eve had gotten over her prejudice against niggers and her hatred of bluebellies. She had even fallen in love with a Yankee. Peter had never told her that his great grandfather had been with an Indiana regiment on that "infamous" march with Sherman. He hadn't wanted to strain her affection.

  Peter moved on up the line and received the alcohol in his soapstone mug. He mixed one part of alcohol with three parts of water in a bamboo bucket and walked back to talk to Eve, who was still in line. He asked her where she had been all day. She replied that she had been wandering around, thinking.

  He didn't ask her what her thoughts had been. He knew. She was trying to think of a way to break off their relationship without pain. They'd been drifting apart for some months, their love suddenly and unaccountably cooled. Peter had done some thinking on this subject himself. But each was waiting for the other to take the initiative.

  Peter said he would see her later, and he pushed through the noisy crowd toward Farrington. Rider was on the dance floor, whooping and whirling with Bullitt's woman. Peter waited until the captain was through telling about his adventures in the 1899 Yukon gold rash. Farrington's tale, which involved losing some of his teeth from scurvy, somehow became a hilarious experience.

  Peter said, "Mr. Farrington, have you made up your mind yet?"

  Farrington paused, his mouth open to launch on another story. His reddened eyes blinked. He said, "Oh, yes! You're . . . ah . . . um . . . named Frigate, right? Peter Frigate. The one who's read a lot. Yes, Tom and I've made up our minds. We'll announce our choice some time during the party."

  "I hope it's me," Peter said. "I really want to go with you."

  "Enthusiasm counts for a great deal,'' Farrington said. "Experience counts for even more. Put the two together, and you have a fine jack-tar."

  Peter breathed deeply and took the plunge.

  "This uncertainty is getting me down. Could you at least tell me if I've been eliminated? If I have been, I can drown my sorrow."

  Farrington smiled. "It really means that much to you? Why?"

  "Well, I do want to get to the end of The River."

  Farrington cocked his eyebrows. "Yeah? Do you expect to find the answers to all your questions there?"

  "I don't want millions, I want answers to my questions," Peter said. "That's a quotation from a character in Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov."

  Farrington's face lit up.

  "That's great! I'd heard of Dostoyevsky but I never had a chance to read him. I don't think there was an English translation of his books in my time. At least, I never ran across any."

  "Nietzsche admitted that he'd learned a lot about psychology just from reading the Russian's novels," Peter said.

  "Nietzsche, heh? You know him well?"

  "I've read him in both English and German. He was a
great poet, the only German philosopher who could write in anything but waterlogged prose. Well, that's not fair, Schopenhauer could write stuff that wouldn't put you to sleep or give you a nervous breakdown while you were waiting for the sentence to end. I don't go along with Nietzsche's conception of the Ubermensch, though. Man is a rope across an abyss between animal and superman. That may not be the exact quotation; it's been a hell of a long time since I read Thus Spake Zarathustra.

  "Anyway, I do believe that man is a rope between animal and superman. But the superman I'm thinking of isn't Nietzsche's. The real superhuman, man or woman, is the person who's rid himself of all prejudices, neuroses, and psychoses, who realizes his full potential as a human being, who acts naturally on the basis of gentleness, compassion, and love, who thinks for himself and refuses to follow the herd. That's the genuine dyed-in-the-wool superman.

  "Now, you take the Nietzschean concept of the superman as embodied in Jack London's novel The Sea Wolf."

  Peter paused, then said, "Have you read it?"

  Farrington grinned. "Many times. What about Wolf Larsen?"

  "I think he was more London's superman than Nietzsche's. He was London's idea of what the superman ought to be. Nietzsche would have been appalled by Larsen's brutality. However, London did kill him off with a brain tumor. And I suppose that London meant to show by this that there was something inherently rotten about Larsen as superman. Maybe he meant to tell the reader that. If he did, it went over the heads of most of the literary critics. They never got the significance of Larsen's manner of death. Then, too, I think London was also showing that man, even superman, has his roots in his animal nature. He's part of Nature, and no matter what his mental attainments, no matter how much he defies Nature, he can't escape the physical facts. He is an animal, and so he's subject to disease, such as brain tumors. How are the mighty fallen.

  "But I think that Wolf Larsen was also, in some respects, what Jack London would have liked to be. London lived in a brutal world, and he thought that he had to be a superbrute to survive. Yet, London had empathy; he knew what it was to be one of the people of the abyss. He thought that the masses could find relief from their sufferings, and realize their human potential, through socialism. He fought for it all his life. At the same time, he was a strong individualist. This conflicted with his socialism, and when it did, his socialist beliefs lost out. He wasn't any Emma Goldman.